[Probably an easy one] What's causing this strange skin shading difference?

[VenomousOuroboros]

See the pic.  The front of the character looks lit correctly when I rotate the camera around to her front.  As I rotate away, though, the skin darkens like so:

Spoiler

I'm using a huge modlist, so I'll take any questions about what specific mods I'm using, but I won't try to spill it all out in one big list right up front.
What I can say for sure right now is that I'm not using the Community Shader Subsurface Scattering plugin, so that's not it.  I am using almost every other Community Shaders feature, though.

I'm not using any body type or overlays that I haven't used before (freckles, tanlines, etc.), and I haven't made any major switches between UBE/CBBE-3BA/UNP.  It's pretty much always been 3BA.

 

[Grey Cloud]

Assuming her hands are okay I would guess that one of the body skin texture files is missing.

I can never remember which one it is but you should have these four:

femalebody_1.dds

femalebody_1_msn.dds

femalebody_1_s.dds

femalebody_1_sk.dds

[VenomousOuroboros]

@Grey Cloud Ah, the mystery deepens.  I have all four (with redundancies) according to MO2:

[traison]

Either the msn provided by Bijin Skin is flat or otherwise invalid, or you have a skinOverride with key 6 key 9 and index 1. I'm going to guess it's the latter.

 

Same issue as here.

Edited September 4, 2025 by traison

[VenomousOuroboros]

@traison Awesome, I was able to narrow it down to the "FemaleBody_chubby1_msn.dds" normal map, from the Winterweight mod, which I had since uninstalled.

If I remove the "entire" skinOverrides section of the RaceMenu Preset that I was using (which consists only of that one texture's entry, as shown below), could that safely resolve the problem, or do I need to keep some part of that section in the file?

   "skinOverrides" : [
      {
         "firstPerson" : false,
         "slotMask" : 4,
         "values" : [
            {
               "data" : "Actors\\Character\\Winterweight\\Female\\FemaleBody_chubby1_msn.dds",
               "index" : 1,
               "key" : 9,
               "type" : 2
            }
         ]
      }
   ],

 

[traison]

Since the mod that added it is gone, it will be enough to edit the RM preset and reapply it.

 

Remove the object from the skinOverrides array, such that the skinOverrides array becomes:

"skinOverrides" : [],

 

Keep the indentation and whitespaces, also note the comma at the end. The JSON parser in RM is most likely not a full or standards compliant implementation. JSON parsers in Skyrim mods in general tend to be quite allergic to formatting that deviates from the format they themselves produce.

 

Also be careful your text editor doesn't add the UTF8 BOM when saving.

 

Edit: The key number I specified in my previous post was wrong. It's key 9, like in the jslot clip you posted above. I've edited my post to fix the error.

Edited September 4, 2025 by traison